i wanted to start a conversation with everyone who is a part of FOSS United, salaried or not.
i personally don’t understand why FOSS United as an organisation refutes the conventional paradigms of validation for college students.
yes, a title in a NGO holds value for one’s resume
yes, a hackathon cert holds value for one’s resume
yes, experience from volunteering for events holds value for one’s resume
yes, all the college students are doing work for the org for our resume!
we obviously care about the open movement a lot, but as students, putting our career aside for our political/personal beliefs is often a conscious, difficult choice, which does not guarantee us anything. in a country which has such a competitive tech environment, there’s a very real possibility that we might end up getting jobs at companies which might not be open source friendly. being a part of a movement which has significant professional significance paired with social significance establishes an overlap, which can be perceived as a conflict of interest in judging the character of a member of the org.
yes, i use linux every day. yes, i run an open source club. yes I’m working on open hardware in a research internship. but what if i want to work in a FAANG for the work benefits or compensation as the breadwinner? does that make me less of an enthusiast? less of a volunteer? no.
rejecting the notion of certs, positions, and other conventional ways of acknowledging all of the work by the volunteers just to try and avoid superficial folks who do things simply for their resume is an irrational purist gesture, much like other grand gestures the greater open source community is known for.
just because it is a movement does not mean it is the one true cause of life
i feel frustrated as a part of this community, which I did not express till today as a professional measure, and I’m only posting this since internet forums historically are extremely transparent, treating opinions as independent threads irrespective of the (usually anonymous) OP. This post is not in context of any experiences, it was inspired by a discussion regd. provision of certificates to localhost volunteers for FOSSHack 2024. i will continue working in FOSS United regardless, as i believe it is a wonderful effort for a personally significant cause.
Please note that the following **opinions are my own**, shared as a direct response to the views in the original post in this topic-thread. I do not claim them to be FOSS United's official stance or anything like that. Most of the following post is a "stream-of-consciousness" that i hammered out on a sleepless Sunday night catching-up on the week's "social media", that included this forum. Forgive the verbosity.
Can you be a bit more specific?
Why do you think certs and positions are needed?
What other “conventional ways of acknowledging” are you referring to?
Where did you get this as being the only reason?
…and even if it is,
do you have any alternative approaches in mind
to avoid attracting folks joining for the sake of these perceived transactional rewards?
Do any of these alternative approaches
NOT require additional effort from the members
to monitor / evaluate / filter the churn due to folks participating to “game the system” ?
Similar to the instances where
OSS projects do NOT look forward to “drive-by” commits,
as most of them fail to understand the overall architecture, nor follow the coding-guidelines laid-out by the project, and hence ignore such attempt to contribute.
Maybe communities also do NOT looking forward to certain type of participants,
and are politely saying - “Thank you for your interest. but, we are currently NOT looking for such contributions. Hence, we will kindly refrain from incentivising such participation.”
If that is your need, maybe go ahead and do that for now.
And maybe once you are comfortable enough to (or can afford to)
participate without the need for meaningless titles and hackathon certs,
… …
As someone involved in hiring, please note that most of these meaningless titles and certs are usually considered the “filler” / “spam” bits in the resumes.
Best-case, you may be asked - “So, what exactly did you actually do as a [meaningless title at arbitrary community] ?”
…giving you an opportunity to share if you have done something meaningful.
IMHO, if you achieve something meaningful at FOSS United (or any such endeavour),
simply stating that in a sentence (or two) in your resume will have the necessary impact
(unlike mentioning some arbitrary cert or title that has no validity).
Maybe I’m wrong, recruiters don’t care about the stuff I mentioned. Maybe its also irrelevant for applying for higher edu abroad. These conventional approaches of validation, to me, are reliable tangible evidences. And I think it should be the volunteers choice to add or not add them to their CV. I personally only add club lead and volunteer at my city chapter in my resume, not any certs or anything. But I think being able to collect these evidences isn’t irrational.
Why do I think positions are required?
Well, most of corporate follows a hierarchical architecture, which reflects in their hiring process. At a college level, your “rank” in an org defines how you can add it to your resume, just to get an interview. Atleast that’s what I know. I understand that FOSS United wants to challenge that with a flat democratic structure, but that aspiration does not invalidate this real world situation. I don’t have a solution in hand, I’m eager to hear if you have any ideas on how it can be a win-win for both students in the org, and for the org’s larger scale vision.
Feel free to share your achievements in your resume.
Also, please be aware that having an arbitrary title or “rank” is NOT an achievement.
These are NOT achievements.
They are meaningless unless you describe what you actually did / achieved in the role. (and if you are doing that, you don’t need to mention the title/rank, that’s just noise)
Please don’t be anxious looking at keyword-stuffed resumes/profiles of others.
They are wasting their own time (and the time of others who read/review their profiles/resumes).
I’m not aware of what this is a response to. But I was witness to a prolonged debate between @wisharya and Srinivas who used to teach BSc Honors students at the venue of FOSS hack 3.0. The debate was on the need for certificates and Srinivas was passionately making an argument for how his students are put under a lot of pressure by the academic system and a simple participation certificate can make the difference between them joining vs not (because in the system people value these certificates and even attendance is based on these).
It will be useful to consider if FOSS United is puritan only when it comes to students, or whether this “right incentives” are applied to government and industries too. What I’ve observed is that power/money doing whatever they want with open source (or fake open source) projects is not really called out in here, rather they’re provided a platform to advertise and gain goodwill. One should really think about where to be “pure” and where to be “pragmatic”.
I personally think that certifications don’t add value unless there’s some practical application of it (numerous Coursera certificates mean nothing if there’s no application of the domain in any way).
But as a token of appreciation from the organisation towards the volunteers will be much appreciated in any case.
It’s really difficult to say whether this certification will be the final nail in the coffin during interviews and placements because the other things in a CV matter as well ( I’ve heard many cases where the entire interview was on some project the student did )
Hey Soham, the following are personal opinions and not the official stance of the FOSS United Foundation (or the FOSS United Community for that matter). Just being explicit. And a sincere thank you for starting this conversation on the Forum.
I will first respond to your comments and then, I will try to provide brief thoughts on “Being in FOSS United as a college student”.
Because “conventional paradigms of validation for college students” don’t seem to support/help FOSS. Please correct me if I am wrong because it’s been 8+ years since I’ve been out of college and maybe colleges have changed drastically during this time. I’m more than happy to hear about existing conventional paradigms that have actively enabled the creation of FOSS.
In my humble opinion, this is a very cynical take on college students @Soham_Kulkarni . A large number of students we (FOSS United Foundation) have interacted with are working for the Foundation/Community to understand, take part in, and support the FOSS movement and not just for their resume.
In a competitive tech environment/market, you should attempt to differentiate yourselves. And in our humble opinion, FOSS is a meaningful differentiator e.g. FOSS contributions and FOSS community management. And we are hopefully providing visibility into companies that are open source friendly.
Finally, if you’re looking for a role where thousands or tens of thousands of applicants are fighting for a job, then you’re right, maybe these resume points are the only thing that differentiate you from another candidate. If not, if you’re trying to compete for rules that involve hundreds or preferably tens of candidates, I concur with @CVSs observation that the hiring teams don’t really care about these “achievements”. We have seen people around us pad their resumes so we’re able to see through a resume quickly.
I don’t understand this. Could you please rephrase or elaborate?
In my understanding, it’s not an irrational purist gesture, it’s the only pragmatic choice we have. Imagine the amount of churn that a community will have if every person in the community is only there to pad their resume. Imagine the amount of management overhead the Foundation/Community will have from onboarding, mentoring, steering, guiding, and then offboarding volunteers throughout the year, year-after-year. All while working with a bare bones budget and a skeleton crew of people.
The pragmatic option is to say “No Thank you” to the people who are simply here to pad their resume. It means that there will be fewer volunteers but that will also help us grow steadily, while maintaining the culture of the Foundation and the broader Community.
And i’m not sure what other grand gestures you are referring to.
Being in the FOSS United community as a college student
Existing academic systems in India have not been able to move the needle in a significant manner with regards to FOSS adoption in College and beyond. There are a few initiatives across the country to improve FOSS adoption in Colleges and beyond and the FOSS United Student Clubs is one such initiative.
“The term “hoop-jumper” was coined by the writer and former professor William Deresiewicz to describe the behavior of his students at Yale, who seemed more concerned about getting A’s and adding bullet points at one of the world’s best universities to follow their curiosity”
From “The Pathless Path” by Paul Millerd.
There are very few places as good as Yale University but no matter what college a student attends, the time that they spend on college campuses is incredibly previous. We want to inculcate a spirit of tinkering and hacking on college campuses, and support this spirit to create FOSS. I think that is what the FOSS United Community broadly has to offer to a Student community. The academic curricula have been widely criticized as not creating an industry-ready workforce and interestingly, in our experience, the spirit of tinkering and hacking usually leads to good problem solvers instead of rule-followers. While bringing awareness to the philosophy and politics behind FOSS, I think we want to be pragmatic with the FOSS Student Clubs to ensure that we can provide exposure to the student community about job opportunities around FOSS.
I think through the FOSS United Community, a Student hopefully has access to experts from the FOSS community in India and visibility about companies that heavily (or solely) rely on FOSS from India. The specific ways and means by which access is provided differ from time to time e.g. monthly meetups, annual conference, hackathon. We might explicitly or implicitly provide visibility about companies by having them as sponsors, venue hosts or by inviting speakers from the companies.
There is more to be said here but I’ll stop by attempting to set expectations. I think the Student Clubs program needs long-term involvement from the Students e.g. multiple years, maybe even throughout the college degree. And the program needs deep involvement i.e. spending weekends hacking and tinkering to understand FOSS Projects, incorporating FOSS into the academic curricula, etc. And just to be clear, we can’t promise any results.
Another problem is that these measures (hackathon certificates, event volunteering) become targets (who has the most certificates, who volunteered the most, who has the biggest title). And “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.
Because “conventional paradigms of validation for college students” don’t seem to support/help FOSS. Please correct me if I am wrong because it’s been 8+ years since I’ve been out of college and maybe colleges have changed drastically during this time. I’m more than happy to hear about existing conventional paradigms that have actively enabled the creation of FOSS.
Consider HyprThrd | LinkedIn . This is a student driven initiative in academia focusing on RISC-V. They are backed by PES Bangalore, and are contributing to open hardware research. This community wouldn’t have thrived without college backing.
I personally had a discussion with the HOD of my department, and she was surprised to hear that certificates aren’t being given to volunteers, let alone attendees. She felt less comfortable promoting the event considering the lack of certs. Its a chicken and egg problem. Without college backing, it’ll be very difficult for FOSS Clubs to thrive. I believe that the modern college atmosphere has changed. There’s constantly events about FOSS from technical clubs, from GDSCs, etc. We’re told to have an active GitHub more often than we’re told to have an active LinkedIn. FOSS United is a part of this via Clubs. Being pragmatic and providing recognition to contributions which materialise these events only makes sense to keep the club going. The approach of funding Clubs means that FOSS United has a say in the large scale decisions by them. My college is providing a very minimal amount to fund FOSSHack, as opposed to other clubs, which are fully backed by the college. If we follow along FOSS United’s decisions, we’re just alienating ourselves from the college more. Which will result in less events, less cooperation, and just generally start a fistfight at the grassroots to even recruit new members.
In my humble opinion, this is a very cynical take on college students @Soham_Kulkarni . A large number of students we (FOSS United Foundation) have interacted with are working for the Foundation/Community to understand, take part in, and support the FOSS movement and not just for their resume.
I might have worded it vaguely, but I meant that students in FOSS United aren’t here purely for the open movement. It’s impossible for that to be true. We’re here for our resume as well.
We have seen people around us pad their resumes so we’re able to see through a resume quickly.
I believe I am ill equipped to contribute to the CV conversation. Which is why I simply acknowledged CVS’ thoughts, and the same for your views. I appreciate the experienced perspective, even though it is opposing to everyone else’s. I was simply parroting what the environment around me says, be it profs, be it LinkedIn, be it fellow students. Everyone’s going after these goals (tainted by Goodhart’s Law, as you said), and I’d be a fool if I didn’t give it a thought as well. I haven’t given corporate interviews yet, let alone taken them.
I don’t understand this. Could you please rephrase or elaborate?
Students are in FOSS United for 2 reasons: contributing to the movement, and as a vested interest, furthering their career. The latter should not reflect negatively regarding their emotions regarding the movement. The contributions (technical/organisational/logistical/etc) of a student member of the community should not be lessened because they’re also a student so it’s not purely for the open movement, but also for their own career.
Imagine the amount of management overhead the Foundation/Community will have from onboarding, mentoring, steering, guiding, and then offboarding volunteers throughout the year, year-after-year. All while working with a bare bones budt get and a skeleton crew of people.
What is the goal for FOSS Clubs then, if not establish an autonomous low cost system in which the PoC is onboarded, mentored, steered, guided, finding their own replacement? The recurring expenditure being event budgeting, not for stipends, or salaries. The PoC specifically chosen for their ability to manage the same for ten, twenty, fifty, however many students, further influencing an entire campus to increase open source contributions, usage, and create a new generation of employees/management who ask if they can opt for Linux in their corporate environment, seeing the recent Zerodha statements by the CEO. This is what I thought the vision of FOSS Clubs was. Generating certificates doesn’t cost a significant recurring amount. You don’t even need to print it, a PDF is fine. Neither does a made up title, be it “Club Lead”, or “Distinguished Volunteer Chosen by a Committee from India’s Leading Open Source Foundation”. It does motivate the students though. Which is the pragmatic reality. We’re here for our resume as well. The leads, aren’t really here for their resume. Because being a FOSS Club lead isn’t worth it unless you singlehandedly care so much about open source, people think that’s your name. You debug people’s Linux installs day in day out. For what? Because you enjoy introducing people to the open philosophy, to open source products.
I think through the FOSS United Community, a Student hopefully has access to experts from the FOSS community in India and visibility about companies that heavily (or solely) rely on FOSS from India. The specific ways and means by which access is provided differ from time to time e.g. monthly meetups, annual conference, hackathon. We might explicitly or implicitly provide visibility about companies by having them as sponsors, venue hosts or by inviting speakers from the companies.
All of this is really great, in my eyes being accomplished by the org. It’s wonderful to see someone care.
And i’m not sure what other grand gestures you are referring to.
This is a tangential discussion but:
I was referring to the stubbornness of open communities, in only adopting their version of “open/libre/free”. Being a very vocal small group, open communities are plagued with instances of blaming the users, for example the ever so popular issue of Nvidia on Linux. Yes, Nvidia is at fault with their terrible drivers. But if Linux needs to become the default, it is sadly upon the community to be helpful to people attempting to troubleshoot their device. At the end of the day, getting more users on Linux provides Nvidia, a corporation, financial incentive to fix its garbage drivers. It is quite difficult to not panic when one’s laptop has such issues, and unless you’re on some specific “beginner/noob” forums, you will not meet nice helpful responses. Using proprietary drivers in an open source operating system is the reality, the pragmatic reality, to which buying a Thinkpad with libreboot is not always the solution. A grand gesture here is to disregard user requirements such as CUDA. ROCm isn’t the solution… yet, neither is ZLUDA… yet.
A major cost is filtering out folks
who are participating ONLY to pad their profiles even if it comes at the cost of the community.
The situation is that volunteers are dime a dozen,
time/attention of maintainers / mentors is the critical resource in short supply,
(eg. limited bandwidth/attention available from the mentor/maintainer).
In such a situation,
an easy way out to prevent misuse/wasting the critical limited resources
is to eliminate (or atleast reduce) any significant source of misuse/waste
i.e. NOT attract folks interested in padding their profiles by associating with the community.
Communities that continue operating this way,
i believe, they consider the loss of potential contributors,
as an acceptable loss (better than the alternatives).
Not everything has to grow exponentially or die.
Lots of communities existed before we were born.
Plenty of them will continue to exist even after we die.
PS: This is not something new or unique to FOSS United. It is a well-established challenge involved in managing any project/initiative; often taught/studied in business management. If you are interested in this aspect, you can start by reading about the Principal-Agent problem.
Hi folks, I’ve been a long-time lurker on this forum, and this is my first reply.
As someone who works in the broader global OSS ecosystem, I have considered this for a long time. Please note that these are my opinions alone.
Rejecting the notion of certs, positions, and other conventional ways of acknowledging all of the work by the volunteers just to try and avoid superficial folks who do things simply for their resume is an irrational purist gesture, much like other grand gestures the greater open source community is known for.
This is not a FOSS United-only stance. Most of the broader open-source ecosystem you allude to in your response is the same. As a maintainer for multiple global projects, I can confirm that trivial/drive-by commits aren’t appreciated and don’t scale for the value they add to the project. Surprisingly, contributors making such contributions don’t go beyond those commits either because those kind of efforts aren’t encouraged or rewarded.
Being pragmatic and providing recognition to contributions which materialise these events only makes sense to keep the club going.
This does make sense. However, incentivising doesn’t have to take the same form everywhere. A meaningful way to recognize contributors can take different shapes and sizes and vary from one organisation to another.
Neither does a made up title, be it “Club Lead”, or “Distinguished Volunteer Chosen by a Committee from India’s Leading Open Source Foundation”. It does motivate the students though. Which is the pragmatic reality. We’re here for our resume as well .
As a person who has also hired people (freshers, even), none of those “titles” matter. Nor do the certificates - whether physical or digital. Why? It’s because neither of those titles is proof of what you can deliver in your job role unless your role is that of a Community Manager or Head of Community or Marketing. Anybody who tells you otherwise is lying.
What does matter is how technically credible you are during your interview process. In all probability, many Indian students start out as junior systems/software engineers and move up from there. Neither of those titles help a hiring manager or the HR ascertain whether you will be good at the role they’re hiring for. So those are, in simple words, resume fluff.
To reiterate again, the following are personal opinions and not the official stance of the Foundation or the Community.
Out of personal curiosity, can I ask what Open Hardware Research is happening because it’s not obvious looking at the LinkedIn page or the webpage. And the GitHub account contains a CUDA 101 workshop repository but nothing Open Hardware-related.
And how is the college backing the initiative? Is the college providing academic credit for being a part of the initiative? Does the college loosen attendance requirements for students who are actively taking part in the initiative? It’ll be good to be explicit about how the college is backing the initiative.
Can I ask why the HoD is uncomfortable with no certificates? What value do the certificates provide from the point of view of the HoD? And is this a problem only with your department or is it a problem with all departments at your college because remember that FOSS is by everyone, for everyone and it’s not just exclusive to Computer Science departments.
If this is really the case, there is no need for FOSS Student Clubs. Seriously. If there are sufficient FOSS-related events happening on a college campus, then FOSS Uniteds’ efforts are best spent elsewhere. We are always happy to welcome students from that college into our community but won’t have to spend effort ourselves to educate the students about FOSS.
Implicitly, we have a “Do No Harm” policy. We don’t want the Student Club coordinators to run into issues with the college body or authorities because of FOSS Uniteds’ decisions. If our decisions/stance is causing harm, the best thing would be to halt the Student Club activities while we figure out how to proceed further.
I try to be very careful with my words which is why I’m explicitly pointing out that “recruit” (in my mind) implies a give and take relationship. “welcome” is what i would prefer. “recruiting” creates hard boundaries - bringing new members in is hard and it is bad for existing members to leave and something to be prevented. “welcoming” creates soft boundaries - new members can join with little to no effort and existing members leaving to explore other clubs isn’t something to be prevented.
This is an overly broad statement. There might definitely be a lot of students who are here for the resume as well but I can point out at least 1 student who is in FOSS United purely for the open movement. A long time ago, my masters’ thesis advisor told me not to make overly broad statements because they are almost impossible to prove and mostly easy to disprove.
What do you mean by “opposing everyone else’s”? Do you mean that we hold a minority opinion and that the majority believes that certificates and resume padding is necessary to find meaningful jobs? I’m not sure about that because given my interaction, i’m reasonably sure that a majority of the FOSS United community holds the opinion that certificates and resume points don’t really hold value in hiring.
I 100% agree with you.. Their contributions are not lessened. The question though is of long-term sustainability of the community (any community for that matter). Let’s take a GSoC project as an example and I hope you see the parallel to managing the FOSS United community. Almost every CS student (and almost every college student from what I’ve heard) wants to get into GSoC. How many of the students who got into GSoC stick to the project and become a mentor and a regular contributor? How many students who didn’t get through still choose to contribute to the project that they applied for? How much time and energy is spent by the maintainers year-on-year to create meaningful projects, evaluate applications, mentor, shepherd, and offboard new contributors year-on-year. It’s great that Google is choosing to support FOSS projects financially but they also now have an amazing hiring pipeline. The FOSS projects are definitely benefiting from GSoC - features are implemented, bugs are fixed, documentation is updated - but the question is how does a project decide whether or not being a part of GSoC is worth it?
I apologize for the confusion but i meant superficial volunteers when i made this statement. I thought it was evident from the context but I should have been specific.
The culture and standards that we set for the first few batches of FOSS Student Clubs is extremely important. At the moment, we seem to be leaning away from a highly transactional system where a majority are constantly worried about their resumes towards a system where a majority are there purely for the FOSS movement and the spirit of tinkering and hacking. And we’re figuring out where the line is that we are comfortable with.
Let’s talk about cost. You are absolutely right that it doesn’t cost a significant recurring amount if we simply send PDFs. But,
Someone needs to design a certificate. actually, many different kind of certificates e.g. meetup attendees, volunteers, leads, hackathon winners, hackathon participants, conference attendees, conference speakers, etc. Let’s say that we go with only one certificate for now - club event attendees and club team members
Someone needs to do the back office work of collating the names, generating the PDFs, and distributing the PDFs. On a recurring basis. For all events in Student Clubs. That sounds like one volunteer for the entire year focusing purely on certificates
Here’s the big “cost” - how does someone validate that a certificate came from FOSS United? How does FOSS United handle future verification requests that start coming in from organizations that have been provided a FOSS United certificate? (This isn’t hypothetical, we handled such a case last week) If it’s a simple PDF file, anyone can duplicate an existing certificate to create fakes. How do we maintain the reputation that FOSS United name has built so far and prevent duplicates/fakes? Well, we considered using https://openbadges.org/, which at least gives us the ability to point to a single location where the authenticity of a badge/certificate can be verified. But we’re now back at the issue of designing and distributing the badges/certificates.
@Soham_Kulkarni it only occurred to me today that there is no mention of enabling the creation of FOSS in this thread, which is a fundamental reason why Student Clubs exist. At the end of the day, if FOSS creation and domain-specific usage isn’t increasing in a college year-on-year because of a college club, recognition via certificates is (in my personal and humble opinion) meaningless.
NGL the meaning of FOSS has been manipulated which causes students to think more about their fame, status and all…
I still don’t think certificates will even help from FOSS United in the first place (No one looks at certification). As for the resume, you can mention it in one line and easily make your network while leveraging the foundation. You also need to be genuine with your work and help others.
I don’t get any advantage from organizing FOSS United Delhi because it is simply not related to what role people ask but leveraging the network and your personal growth will always take you to places.
IMO clubs are made in the first place for a person’s growth in every direction. Having such PDFs may be giving fake hopes as they may think it will boost their resume. It still doesn’t.
GDSC certifications are useless and don’t help.
All city chapter organizers ain’t getting any sort of certificate or stipend to run this. These people are organizing just to advocate FOSS and help the community to grow further. The goodwill still exists.
There is a reason why FOSS isn’t for everyone. It is for people who are self-motivated and can take out time. If one simply comes to add it as a resume add-on, it won’t help if they aren’t putting any effort in the long run.
I appreciate the insights. I have my hands tied with the upcoming hackathon, and my goal of starting a conversation was achieved with a lot of fruitful takes. I personally want to contribute to FOSS United regardless of how this concludes, since I don’t care about the position or cert that much. This was mostly begun since I had people asking me why we’re not giving certs and I didn’t have an answer. Now I can just redirect them to this thread.
thank you everyone for your takes.
will reply to the unresolved questions once the hackathon dust settles down.
Wonderful read, thank you so much for sharing. The remaining reply, I don’t agree or disagree, I don’t have the level of experience to comment on the greater fluctuations in open communities.
Of course, of course.
Interesting, did not know that. I thought that management roles were considered to be a foundation in being a decent manager if one had a purely technical academic background (eg. engineering graduate with experience organising college events).
They had weekly podcasts/interactive sessions, hosting leading comp. arch. faculties, with an emphasis on RISC-V. This emphasis on RISC-V is collegewide, reflecting in the extremely close ties ‘InCore Semiconductors’ bears with PES Bangalore in terms of hiring. PES students work on VLSI projects involving RISC-V, participate in the HyprThrd club, promote/enable the relevant people to promote open hardware in a technical manner (to the developers, not the managers, in a way). HyprThrd isn’t open hardware exclusive, however this synergy reflects my original point (promoting open source among college students is done in modern colleges, as per the college’s methodologies)
The certificate issue is collegewide. I am in a college where some students pony up thousands of rupees to pay for internship certificates from phantom companies such as SkillCraft, InternPe, etc. which have no real world impact. Please feel free to discuss the need for certificates with her during the planned meeting.
On a purely personal, anecdotal level, this was jarring. I understand that this is a rational take, I understand the thought process, but after facing all kinds of nonsense from college management, ranging from cancelling overnight permissions for FOSSHack over trivial reasons, to wasting everyone’s time with “Orange Data Mining Tool” peer sessions, just to hear someone from FOSS United say “maybe we don’t need FOSS Clubs”. Its tough for me to react in a detached manner. The FOSS events I was referrring to were the token events “Introduction to Git”, “Explaining GitHub”, “Installing Ubuntu”. I saw several of these from other clubs in my college, but they did not take the time to explain a single thing about open source, or about why its a good choice, what open licensing is, etc. It was purely “You’ll need this for interviews during placement”. I don’t think that fulfils anyone’s interpretation of what FOSS Clubs should be. These events are just using/abusing open source claiming to the participants that it is for career development.
Most of the trouble I’ve experienced with forming this club has been surrounding events. I don’t think a club needs to have ‘events’. I think a club can have weekly meetings for working on projects. It can have Linux installation parties once in a while. But most recurring events do not fulfil the purpose of contributing to open source, simply promoting it, that too at a very superficial level. However obligations from the college side, combined with the entire club team being very excited about events meant we ended up spending quite a lot of time on this since the SIT club got approved by FOSS United.
Recruiting as in, during the induction of juniors, each club “recruits” new members.
I think, with no factual basis, based on interaction with a large number of IT folks with 10-15 years of experience holding down managerial positions at corporate software vendors, based on interaction with all of the folks in my college administration, that your/Divya’s/CVS’ stance here is in a minority. Again, as I admitted previously, I do not have experience in corporate, I’m just anxious to make sure I can get a paycheck once I’m out of college. May it be organising events, may it be getting certificates, doing courses, I’m trying most of the opportunities besides working on open source hardware in an internship, spreading the word about open source in my free time, and now very recently, beginning projects in my club.
During all of my in-person conversations while engaging in this thread, volunteers and participants did feel like their contributions were lessened. I understand what you mean by referencing the GSoC pipeline, it’s tough.
Yep, there’s still a decent chunk of money involved. But if it’s down to this club I put blood, sweat, and tears into, to just contribute to open source in whatever form the crowd from SIT can, losing steam over FOSS United not providing acknowledgement, I felt the strong urge to present an opposing view.
Our club was the only club of just FY students, so it took me a year to bring them to a point where they don’t ask me why Linux is better. Instead they smirk when our Operating Systems faculty talks about it while getting work done on their dualbooted laptops. We were able to secure funding from Boris Mann of fission.codes in order to fund the routers. I believe you already had a look at the document detailing the plan for contributing to open source with these. We also have a technical member working closely with FOSSEE since MumbaiFOSS, helping out with software testing for their ‘eSim’ software. Contributing to FOSS superficially with novice developers is something I did not want, which brings me back to the past year which was more event focused (helped with promotion as well, allowing us to find existing genuinely motivated FOSS enthusiasts along with cultivating an open source friendly culture among those unaware).
I disagree. FOSS should be by everyone, for everyone.
This is not the attitude one can keep while introducing new people to open source. Open source is designed for modularity, accessibility, maintainability, being a long term solution that becomes more convenient than proprietary counterparts due to the merits of collaboration. Open source, be it as a developer, user, or corporation, cannot be “for those who are self motivated and can take out time”. Open source becoming the default will become a catch-22 if there’s no pragmatic introduction to it.
Do you think a certificate would be an acknowledgement that will serve in your career? Definitely not.
I hope you realize that open source is all voluntary and one should not expect anything in return. Most of the time and effort invested is not rewarding and one must accept that. Again if you want a paycheck you still need to prepare for jobs separately. A referral may be beneficial from the foundation only if you have worked hard for them.
In all my interviews no one simply looked at my work at FOSS United because they didn’t care and not relevant to jobs.
It is not for people who simply think of getting a resume add-on. It would do more harm to the ecosystem in the long run. We can already see the harm and consequences of that.
You need to have this attitude when introducing new people to open source because it is a choice and one can use it for their own and corporate purposes.
Even MNCs have their own private or forked tools which they use so there is no need.
Speaking from the perspective of a very less experienced professional and not a student.
My personal stance and not FOSS United’s.
The idea of certificates itself sounds very cliche to me. Certificates never mattered in the past, and won’t matter in the longer run. All the faculties and this education system has shaped students mind in wrong structure. The education system never taught students to think about tinker with different tools, writing more code on a sunday, or making a project which solves the problem is important than “Participation Certificate”. IMHO, someone looking for certificates and resume points is a very narrow mined and someone with a short goal. Certificates are just waste, I have designed and printed that waste myself and provided them to my faculty as well for certain quick needs. Apologies for the bold words.
I am not surprised with your HOD being surprised about FOSS United not providing a certificate. I wish you could make her understand the importance of code or contribution more than the certificate. The modern day students have materialized the term FOSS a lot. It’s a choice and not a need. Not talking about teachers here because at the first place they don’t know about the Free Software Ideology and Philosophy.
I think I agree with the part where you talked about more folks (not using the word students, as that would generalize it) coming towards FOSS United to fill their resumes and add experiences on the Linkedin Profiles, because I’ve seen many do that. But like rahul said, there are a couple of them who are solely here for The Movement and not just to satisfy their needs.
Last year, during SolapurFOSS my college HOD had asked us why are we working as laborers for FOSS United. Once, we had skipped classes to give introductory session in nearby colleges which they got know about. We were separately taken in for questions by almost 2-3 staff members. I was happy to ignore them straight, because its not worth wasting time in front of such people. I believe in not helping those who can’t help themselves.
What does this have to do with the discussion ? I don’t think this is relevant. Free Software Enthusiasts and developers never expected anything in return, how does that relate to this discussion? Are you talking about paychecks or about the need of certificates and acknowledgement as a contributor ?
FOSS Contribution comes through passion and the will to learn and solve a problem. Incentives and rewards are the words which have no place in this dictionary.
People like Steve Marquess and Stephen Henson have struggled in the past to get money for one person but had still maintained OpenSSL till 2012/14 until Heartbreak became public. (Please correct me if I’m wrong in the last part).
I disagree. FOSS should be a choice by everyone, for everyone.
The philosophy here is just about doing good work.
This would be my first and last reply to this thread. I don’t see anything which I can learn from in this thread here. But, this is an interesting topic to debate and discuss about with the larger public and audience, hence I have proposed a BoF session at IndiaFOSS. Hoping that the Jury team would feel worth to select this BoF Session.
