given the absolute fucking state of the open source community in general, and the fact that hacker news of all places is where the majority of new open source projects get discovered, is there any interest in starting a community here where folks can announce and solicit for help with their open source projects?
we could possibly use NotAwfulTech, but:
- I kind of want to keep self-promotion out of that community
- my code is probably awful for everyone else, that’s why I’m seeking contributors
let me know if anyone’s down for the new community or wants to expand the scope of NotAwfulTech to include stuff like this. if you’re on team new community also feel free to suggest a name
+1 to interest.
Name wise: If you’re willing to spend time thinking about this, I’d think of all the things you want the community to be, all the things you don’t want it to be, and then move forward from there. Personally, I’d want the vibe to be in opposition to hacker culture, but that’s just me.
I think you’ve got exactly the right idea, especially with regards to the vibes I’d like the new community to have. hacker culture is an embarrassing, toxic, ultra-libertarian thing I’ve seen exclude many more people than it’s welcomed, and as a set of organizing principles it’s holding us back. collective effort can do fucking magical things, but all hacker culture does is insist its only utility is to the corporations using us for our output and only ever demanding more
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Admittedly I used the label “hacker culture” without giving a definition, I definitely meant culture along the lines that @self mentioned. To reiterate, imo what’s more important is defining the vision, which this comment thread has begun the process of.
that’s fair. I think mentally I’ve decoupled corporate and most online hacker culture from hackerspaces (and the friendlier online spaces); even though they share a name and theoretically a basic set of values, there’s such a wide gulf between the kind of hacker culture you’ll see on the orange site or the elitist bullshit you’ll run into if you try and contribute code to the Linux kernel (for example), vs the communal workshop and mentorship environment of a good hackerspace.
one thing I want to emphasize though is that you don’t need to be a hacker to make good and worthwhile contributions. as I talked about elsewhere in this thread, open source has a dire need for designers and other folks doing jobs that aren’t traditionally considered to be a part of hacker culture. also, I feel like modification should be normalized as something everyone does, even for things like operating systems and drivers. the lisp machines that the orange site fetishizes without knowing why got this right: computing environments should do everything they can to make the process of making improvements easy, whether that’s through accessible and complete documentation, better languages, or tooling that lets the user fuck around and find out
I’m pretty ignorant of it and haven’t really looked into it too much, but from the surface the “hacker culture” surrounding things like the Chaos Computer Club and whatnot seem much more palatable, seem skeptical of, or outright reject, capitalist influence and is less right-libertarian than hacker culture in the US.