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The Unemployed Working on OSS Projects
Roger_Explosion writes "In Australia the unemployed have to fulfill a 'mutual obligation' requirement in order to receive welfare payments. What this means is that recipients of welfare payments have to be involved in some sort of activity that improves their chances of finding employment. Until now this has included various types of community service and training and education programs. Recently an organisation called CommunityCode has been established to allow recipients to fulfill this requirement by contributing to OSS projects."
It sure beats community service. I've long maintained that the way to learn to code is by coding. As someone who does hiring into programming positions, I know I would look highly at someone who spent his downtime working on OSS projects.
If I were to be unemployed, this is exactly what I would do! Imagine having all this spare time (since you have no job) to work on any OSS project you want.
Having said that, the dole (what we call welfare here) is pretty low. I think its about 100USD a week? (for all those US people ou there)
Can your karma go above being Excellent?
I work in the Government Department that manages that Mutual Obligation policy and the main programmes around it. But I'm just an average public servant with an interest in IT - not a programmer or IT professional.
Since they're ask for help from people who are experienced in dealing with our Department, maybe this is a way I can properly contribute to an OSS project for the first time.
I think it's brilliant, but I don't think it'd be too long before some software consortium/lobby group/group of "concerned citizens" pulls out the whole "don't use government resources to promote the anti-competitive forces of OSS" argument. I'd bet you can expect to see legislation drafted within a year.
It wouldn't be mandatory - the way "mutual obligation" is supposed to work is that Centrelink is supposed to try and find you a position that matches your interests and skills. Of course if you have no skills or interests you run the risk of being put to work picking up litter by the side of the road.
In my brother's case, he was interested in audio-engineering. Centrelink placed him as a volunteer producer in a community radio station, and from there he got a job at a mastering studio.
So in the case of coding for OSS projects - it would be voluntary. And even if someone did provide half-hearted help (i.e. bad code) there's no obligation on the part of the project to accept the code.
Maybe the Aussie companies will keep more programmers employed since everyone you lay off will go out and code for your oss competitor.
Where is this shortage?! I don't see it and I've looked.
....
Wait a minute! This can't be right, since when has any of these things been involved in mutual obligation for people on government payments? Mutual obligation tasks are menial, pointless and soul destroying. I expect that this program will be barred from being classed as such very soon.
As a single mum who may end up having to full fill some of this mutual obligation stuff if Little Johnny has his way, this sounds like a dream come true. Upping my coding skills, contributing to the community and actually having hope that this will help you get a job
So these people are out of work and can possibly implement OSS as a benefit to their community and therefore collect unemployment? Are you kidding me?
Perhaps if they were employees of a gov program that got cut that would make sense, but why would we start paying those that jumped on the high risk bandwagon 80% of their salary. I know a lot of slashdotters are going to be upset at that, but give me a break! Be compoetetive.
IT work means a lot of different things to diff people. I'm interested to see how it goes. If I can influence further changes I will.
Bill Gates is pushing for more H1-B's, even with the US computer engineer unemployment rate higher than the national average (which is the real reason colleges are seeing fewer apply for CS degrees). Beware Bill and every other software company out there, if the US ever followed suit. They might just get paid by the state to code your competition.
:D
I wish I could fill out an application to be an (oxymoron) paid/unemployed OSS worker.
Cleaning the net one sed at a time! s/sex/sermons/; s/hot/holy/; s/goats/thebible/; www.holysermonswiththebible.com
"Recently an organisation called CommunityCode has been established to allow recipients to fulfill this requirement by contributing to OSS projects."
Well hey! Why not have prisoners work on OSS? They have plenty of time on their hands.
I missed it--where does it say that people are compelled to participate in open-source projects, or participate in volunteer programming at all?
From TFA:
Why? Recipients of Centrelink's Newstart allowance can fufil part or all of their 'mutual obligation' requirements by doing volunteer work for a community organisation; second is that it might be useful for students or other people starting out to get some "real live" development experience.
It says over and over again that this is "volunteer" work, right? An OSS project can't exactly demand a certain number of programmer hours, can it? If people want to contribute, they do--and they get a check from the Aussie gov't, to boot. If they don't want to participate, they don't. They can make Access databases for their local church or boy scout troop, instead.
And besides--every OSS project gets to pick what code actually gets committed, and what gets ignored. If the quality of the dole-programmers' stuff is shit, X.org and KDE won't include it.
Maybe I'm missing something, though--why do you think that people getting a welfare bonus for this counts as coercion?
As a small business developer, I would love this sort of thing.
Quite often it's very hard to get people to do some work without forking out large amounts of money and you're not always sure about the end results (I've had some really terrible code handed in by contractors - worse than even mine).
I have quite a handful of projects, all openSource which would definately gain from this sort of interaction.
Paul.
I wouldn't mind being payed to live a VERY simple life and work on OSS projects that would benefit many. Many countries already have programs where they pay individuals to keep traditional arts alive (Chine/Japan) or keep ancient religion traditions alive (Isreal), so why not keep code alive?
Sydney for starters. If you can't get a technical job in Sydney, either you think you're more qualified than you are, or you are the worst interviwee of all time.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
The goal of the project was to provide cheap (free) hardware and software to underprivledged people in Australia. We used Debian for single installs, and the KDE wm.
It was a fantastic experience - I learnt all about the insides of computers and how to put them together, com ports, (seemingly) thousands of types of cards (video, audio, nics) and how to configure them, etc etc - all common knowledge ot people here, but you need to start somewhere...
We started a project to give thin clients away to poorer groups (libraries/community groups/refugee action collectives or whatever) which we built from the ground up using common knowledge and the wonderful xserver. I think they have since expanded the project, but now use Mandrake/driva.
A lot of the forced vollies didn't want to be there, but for those of us that did, it was great - I spent my first month testing printers, mice, speakers and doing the last check on systems going out the door...
There are plenty of these things around, and it sure beat weeding public gardens....
Ahhh... a touchy subject....
:)
I have worked on a "commercial" project that had to be closed down due to OSS "competition", so now I could/should start working for the other OSS project that "killed" us, to receive welfare payments.. right?
Who is paying??
My cats breath smells like catfood...
Wrong on both counts. Australians were never "exiled", we were and still are proud members of the British Commonwealth. And Australia was not originally discovered with the intent of making a penal colony, the convicts were sent a little later to perform labour and farm work, because England had no more room for them.
And as for us being a pack of halfwits, check out some famous Australian inventions. Not bad for a nation of 25 million people.
Man, I didn't even think of that! Pretty much all programs are lacking in documentation written from a perspective of a real person. With "real people" documentation OSS will look even more appealing.
Depend which "they" you mean.
Mutual Obligation can be fulfiled in a few ways. There are 2 that are primarily relevant to this program
The government will require that 1 of those two are met. If CC.org can demonstrate that your front end to CDRecord was "training" then they'll be happy with that.
Whether the "mentors" at CC.org will want to devote their time to helping you with that is another matter.
Also, at this point I'm not sure whether CC.org will be approved to provide training for #1. It is being promoted as #2.
But in spite of that, I doubt the government will know enough to care. If CC.org says "these people helped our community organisation", then CentreLink will sign off on it.
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I dunno, I think that's a worst case scenario.
I could see myself between jobs and taking a couple of months in relative relaxation, doing nothing but writing open source software to meet my dole requirement, and then spending the rest of my time doing whatever else it is people on the dole do (drink? relax? whatever).
Its quite possible that it might lead to great code, because people are coding for run, with no deadlines, no boss looking over their shoulder, no (serious) responsibilities, no fear of your job getting outsourced - maybe if all those pressures are gone, people can chill out and code like never before!
When I was unemployed, working on OSS projects gave me a purpose. After spending hours a day for nine months and slipping into depression, OSS gave me a new purpose, and a hope. I was keeping my skills sharp. I was contributing to the community. I had a reason to get up in the morning. OSS kept me sane when I thought I was going to go nuts.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Certain once-large organizations have shed a lot of (and will soon shed all ) folks around here, and others are threatening to do the same. Not surprising, since RTP has been so telecom-centric, and unlike Silicon Valley, concentrates its employment base in a handful of large companies (vs. gajillions of startups).
The upshot is that there are a lot of unemployed techies around here who need re-training. Enter TechEngage. The proposition is simple: if you're unemployed, you get to attend a certain number of classes for free (or close to it), and in return, you donate 40 hours of your time to the cause.
I really wish the public sector would wake up to this effort. Oh, sorry, that would be socialist. Can't have that. Unless of course you're an unemployed textile worker in the western part of NC, without even a high-school diploma. Then our state legislature bends over for you, even though you could never contribute as much to the tax base once employed (grumble)..
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
A person who does not have a degree can be very good on one area, but usually lacks on others. There are things that you normally don't learn by just experience that can be very usefull:
Software Engineering, analisis and design are not done very frequently in small companies, I have seen many untrained people just jump into coding after they get handed the requirements. A person with a degree will have some training in analisis and design.
Several technical areas such as linear optimization and language theories. This things you simply don't learn on the working field, yet for many project are required.
Cryptograpy, It often requires deep knowledge of math. Way above what a high schooler can do.
Calculus and Algebra, For some applications, you really need to dig deeper than high school.
Algorithms performance orders. It is difficult to learn how to calculate the performance of an algorithm without formal training.
For what I have seen, programmers without degrees can be really good programmers, but usually lack a broader and more technical knowledge. After all, the person with the degree has spent years of training in very different subjects, and the person without one has most likelly spent years learning one or two things. In the university you are expected to learn how to program in the first trimester, the rest is the really difficult and valuable part.
Also, for the person itself, it is clear it makes a big difference: How much do you think is the average salary for someone with a degree vs someone without one? (Haven't actually looked it up, but it is a no brainer)