Tom Welch wrote:
My name is Tom Welch. I was recently recruited by the Church to define an "open source" strategy for the Church. What does this mean? Well, for years the Church has been a heavy user of open source technology. Many of the back-end systems are all based upon open source software. In fact, the Church has contributed to certain open source projects with improvements that it has made. Because of sensitivity issues, the Church has asked the individual developers to submit changes upstream in the developers name instead of the Church's name. My role, however, is not to get the Church to use more open source software but is to figure out how we can leverage the OSS community to help build applications that the Church does not have the resources to do.Hi, Tom. My name is Brice Hunt. Welcome to the list. For years (since graduating college in 2002), I have been trying to get a programming job at all sorts of places and have very consistently had my resume screened out by human resource departments everywhere (including the Church's HR department--but that was before the more recent hiring procedures were put into place for the technology departments). The few times that I have been able to directly contact a hiring manager, it quickly became obvious that they were looking for someone with a lot of previous management experience that could step right into the management role or were looking for interns because they didn't want or couldn't afford to pay a wage that would support a small family. I always ended up going to work for a farmer or a construction company (I don't mind physical labor, I just love programming more). As my wife completes her A.A.S. degree in drafting and is working in her field of study, she is earning more money now than I ever have in my entire life. What does this mean to you? It means that I am a stay-at-home dad that home-schools my children, that is able to write programs, and that has about 10-20 hours of spare time per week (most weeks--not this summer, though) that I could dedicate to working on open source projects in ways that would directly benefit the church. All I need is to be told what project to work on (or start) and what functionality the church needs to add to the project (or what the goal of the new project is). One point of caution, however:One thing I have observed is that the "flame wars" on this list seem to be much more tame than on many other lists I've seen (e.g. Provo Linux Users' Group). I believe that with a little moderation from an official within the church, the list would be even more tame and cooperative because we could get official word on proper use of information and church policy (seems to be the areas of most contention) instead of endless debate. Brice Hunt |
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