'Til All Are One

It’s a won­der­ful feel­ing when you receive recog­ni­tion — no mat­ter how small — from people whom you respect and admire. That’s why I was stoked to be accep­ted as an offi­cial Ubuntu mem­ber. To be eli­gible, one has to be able to prove that they have con­trib­uted sub­stan­tially to the Ubuntu com­munity. I know serveral good people who were turned down on their first applic­a­tion, so I was nervously bit­ing my fin­ger­nails in the leadup to my approval.

Being present at the IRC meet­ing was a whole task unto itself. I had to wait until one was sched­uled at a time which I could attend. When I dis­covered that one had been announced for 10PM (in my timezone), I pounced and added myself to the agenda. The dis­cus­sion was fas­cin­at­ing, but the meet­ing itself blew out far bey­ond its sched­uled time frame. They only got to me at around 1:30AM. I am very grate­ful to the Ubuntu-​​Au mem­bers who stayed on until then to cheer me on. Isn’t com­munity a won­der­ful thing?

Within ten minutes, I had approval from the Com­munity Coun­cil mem­bers who were present, but I had to wait for the votes of the absent mem­bers. The fol­low­ing even­ing, I received a nice e-​​mail from Ubuntu Launchpad:

Sub­ject: Launch­pad: Your mem­ber­ship status on team Ubuntu Mem­bers was changed
Date: Wed­nes­day 18 Octo­ber 2006 21:03
From: Launch­pad Team Mem­ber­ship Notifier

Hello, The status of your mem­ber­ship on team “ubuntumem­bers” (Ubuntu Mem­bers) was changed from Pro­posed to Approved.

The com­ment for it was:

approved 18÷10÷06 by sabdfl, elmo, jono, for superb con­tri­bu­tion to en_​GB and related effort

Once again, thanks to every­one who provided sup­port, both moral and actual.

For some reason, I’m reminded of the title of a 1980s sit­com. No, my name is not Charles, thank you for remind­ing me.

My man­ager arranged to go on leave over the fort­night school hol­i­day period, and in his pre-​​holiday euphoria he decided to leave the respons­ib­il­ity of per­form­ing his duties with myself.

Almost imme­di­ately after his depar­ture, things began to go beserk. A rash of strange and urgent issues cropped up, and that was on top of the unfin­ished busi­ness he had left us with (although to his credit, he did his best to min­im­ise that). Things which were seem­ingly com­plete reared their ugly heads once more, and I was left to tidy the mess.

I took the role most ser­i­ously, to the point of put­ting in one or two extra hours of work per day. I was stressed to levels that I had not exper­i­enced in years. I’m so incred­ibly grate­ful that this lead­er­ship stint coin­cided with TAFE hol­i­days, oth­er­wise I don’t know what I would have done.

An import­ant skill is an abil­ity to juggle many tasks at once. I am not ter­rible in that respect, but you could not exactly call me adept, either. Had I had more exper­i­ence (lower con­text switch­ing latency, etc.), I might have com­pleted tasks more quickly, but we were so over­worked that I don’t think the dif­fer­ence would have been significant.

I was pain­fully aware that once my fort­night was over, I would have to revert to my pre­vi­ous status and once again work on an equal level with these people. I cer­tainly did not wish to burn any bridges. This forced me to walk a tightrope when it came to weild­ing authority.

Com­mu­nic­a­tion is cer­tainly the key to effect­ive man­age­ment. I would not have got­ten any­where without con­stant liaison with my co-​​workers and other man­agers in the com­pany. On the whole (and des­pite a few stress­ful incid­ents), I was well sup­por­ted by every­one else in the com­pany. As a care­taker, I did not con­sider it to be my place to make any policy changes, but cer­tain cir­cum­stances forced us to adapt. Under advise­ment from above, I imple­men­ted a few tweaks to our pro­ced­ures, hope­fully for the better.

My man­ager has been back for three days, and only today do I feel like I’m back doing my old job and not his. There were a few odds-​​and-​​ends to tie up even after his return, and it took him a little while to get back into the groove as well. I think we have both re-​​found our respect­ive places, though. The feed­back I have received has been very pos­it­ive, and I have been asked to con­sider tak­ing on cer­tain duties on a per­man­ent basis. I’ll have to take some time to reflect upon the past couple of weeks before I can give an appro­pri­ate answer.

They say that the first step towards deal­ing with an addic­tion is admit­ting that you have one. For that pur­pose, I have a con­fes­sion to make: I am addicted to Open Source On The Air. For the unini­ti­ated, OSOTA is a weekly Inter­net radio pro­gramme hos­ted by James and Karin Purser. Being based in Aus­tralia, this pod­cast focuses mainly on issues affect­ing the Aus­tralian FLOSS com­munity. It is broad­cast live on Wed­nes­days from 21:30 (UTC+1000). Besides being a great show in its own right (even if down­loaded after­wards), I love how I can hang out in #loc­alfoss on irc​.freen​ode​.net and provide input while the show is run­ning live. It is this sort of inter­ac­tion that makes free soft­ware so great.

A few weeks ago, Karin decided to announce a com­pet­i­tion. The ques­tion was simple: to sug­gest a ques­tion for a future com­pet­i­tion. An idea sprung to mind fairly quickly, and I men­tioned it over IRC to James. I neg­lected to e-​​mail it, how­ever, and when Karin announced the fol­low­ing week that she had not received any entries, I real­ised that I had com­pletely for­got­ten my idea. The eph­em­eral nature of IRC meant that I couldn’t just look it up (my logs were only short-​​term — curses!). I spent a day and a night wrack­ing my brain before it resur­faced. I pos­ted it to James, and the fol­low­ing week it was announced that I was a win­ner! Mind you, there were only two entries, and both were deemed to be win­ners

The fol­low­ing week, I received my loot: a plush Tux pen­guin and an O’Reilly Linux Ana­tomy poster. At the request of James, I sent him a pho­to­graph of myself with my new pen­guin friend. Fit­tingly, it was taken just prior to a SLUG meet­ing, and in it I’m wear­ing my Soft­ware Free­dom Day 2006 T-​​shirt.

So what was my entry? It’s prob­ably best that I don’t spoil the sur­prise. Stay tuned for it to be announced on Open Source On The Air!

This is quite disturbing:

A 2006 Gal­lup sur­vey of Amer­ican pub­lic opin­ion found that “many Amer­ic­ans har­bour strong bias against U.S. Muslims”.

• 22% say they would not like to have a Muslim as a neighbour.
• 34% believe U.S. Muslims sup­port al-​​Qaeda.
• Only 49% believe U.S. Muslims are loyal to the United States.
• 39% advoc­ate that U.S. Muslims should carry spe­cial ID

The fact that such a large per­cent­age of the pop­u­la­tion har­bours resent­ment against Muslims may explain much of America’s aggress­ive Middle East policy from Israel to Iraq. It’s a lot easier to play with the lives of mil­lions of people if you don’t think of them as civ­il­ised human beings, but ter­ror­ist supporters.

This appears to be con­sist­ent with other stud­ies:

The Media and Soci­ety Research Group of Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity con­duc­ted a sur­vey in Novem­ber of Amer­ic­ans with respect to their atti­tudes towards Muslims. Nearly half (44%) of respond­ents favoured restrict­ing the civil rights of Muslims in some way.

Such atti­tudes often stem from ignor­ance. It is exceed­ingly easy to dehu­man­ise a race/​religion/​culture if you know noth­ing about them:

A sur­vey com­mis­sioned and pub­lished by National Geo­graphic shows that a large major­ity of young Amer­ic­ans between the age of 18–24 are geo­graph­ic­ally illiterate.

Less than 15% of the sub­jects could loc­ate Iraq or Israel on a map. Only 17% could loc­ate Afgh­anistan, even though the sur­vey was car­ried out after the war. 11% could not loc­ate the U.S. on a map.

Now, I am not post­ing this to pick on Amer­ic­ans. In fact, I feel that at least to some extent these res­ults also apply to Aus­tralia and other West­ern coun­tries (e.g. the UK). We like to think of ourselves as ‘enlightened’ soci­et­ies, yet the ignor­ance many people appear to exhibit is astound­ing. There is much in the way of mis­in­form­a­tion and FUD being spread around, inten­tional and oth­er­wise. The solu­tion, I feel, is edu­ca­tion. For instance, I bet that the aver­age Aus­tralian knows very little about Islam: its beliefs, its his­tory and the cul­tures sur­round­ing it. It is all to easy to judge people and events by our own val­ues, the prin­ciples by which we were raised. People need to under­stand that what may look like ‘com­mon sense’ to them is in fact a cul­tural con­struct, and that other cul­tures may see things dif­fer­ently. This diversity is what makes the world inter­est­ing, and this abund­ance of dif­fer­ent views is what has pro­pelled human devel­op­ment since the very beginning.

Those who like to argue that Islam is a back­wards reli­gion or that its people cel­eb­rate an ana­chron­istic cul­ture ought to invest­ig­ate the 1001 Inven­tions Web site:

A unique UK based edu­ca­tional pro­ject that reveals the rich her­it­age that the Muslim com­munity share with other com­munit­ies in the UK and Europe.

1001 Inven­tions is a non-​​religious and non-​​political pro­ject seek­ing to allow the pos­it­ive aspects of pro­gress in sci­ence and tech­no­logy to act as a bridge in under­stand­ing the inter­de­pend­ence of com­munit­ies through­out human history.

Pia has very elo­quently indic­ated the divide between reli­gion and cul­ture, and in doing so I feel she has demon­strated how truly close many world reli­gions are in their core beliefs and values.