Well, it isn’t really quite that simple, but we do now have a process through which anyone can express their interest in contributing through operator work. Previously our recruitment toolkit has been more primitive and consisted of blackmail, bribery and coercion – in other words, when there was pressure to grow the operator team, we simply begged people to join.

So if you’re active on our IRC channels and you think your channel has too few operators, and if you’ve been aching to help, you should consider applying for membership! You might get your chance if

• You are great at resolving conflicts
• You are very patient. Superhuman nerve control is a basic IRC operator feature
• You can take criticism
• You are happy when helping and advising others
• In addition to the Code of Conduct and our IRC Guidelines, you are happy to adhere to some additional guidelines :)

In general, please do not consider becoming an operator because it could be “fun”. It is not, it’s hard work. However, it is often quite rewarding, and you get to operate with a great team of people. You don’t need to be an IRC guru, but you do need to know enough to be able to learn more.

Please be aware that *many* applicants will not become operators for various reasons. This will not necessarily be because we think you would make a bad operator. Only a limited number of operators are ever needed, some timezones are better covered already than others, and so on.

If you feel that you could be a good addition to the IRC Team, please head on to Launchpad and apply to the team corresponding to the channels you want to help in, and create a Wiki page where you explain why you want to join and why you would be a good operator. Think of the wiki page as your resume. Gather testimonials from other people who know you are believe you qualify. Think of those as your references.

Before you do any of the above, be sure to study the official requirements and application process, to ensure everything is well with your application and it will be considered whenever new operators are needed.

For those who don’t know me, I’m a Finnish academic guy and a big freedom fan. I have used, advocated, and supported Ubuntu as long as it has existed, and more in fact – I downloaded my first pre-Warty copy of Ubuntu from nonameyet.com. :)

I hope I can continue to be useful for the Ubuntu community for a long time still. I foresee a glorious future for Free Software and our favorite distribution, and I only wish I can recognize as many opportunities as possible for making Ubuntu a little bit more awesome as they come by. Because they always do.

Big cheers also to our other amazing new EMEA region Ubuntu members. Full speed ahead!

• His blog gets traffic via my blog. Not much but hey, someone might click. Now they can.
• He is properly referenced so that my readers can check what I’m disagreeing with, and also read his point of view.

It seems (at least the under the current legislation) also appropriate to mention that I found Posner’s blog via TechCrunch. Therefore, I’ll also link to their article.

Neither copyright owner was asked for consent before I linked to their content. That’s how the Web works. If someone doesn’t like the Web and the way it works, maybe they shouldn’t use it to publish their copyrighted content in the first place.

In the very same sentence, Posner also suggests we should extend copyright law to “bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent”. I don’t understand why a copyright law extension would be necessary for this.  As one of Posner’s readers notes (in case this isn’t obvious enough), we already need the copyright holder’s consent. The thing is, if you upload your materials onto the Internet and make it freely available to Web surfers, certainly everyone already has your consent to access it.

UPDATE Jul 6 – Simon Owens emailed with some figures on how much traffic he got from a single link on the notorious “leecher” of news content, the Huffington Post. One link, 37,000 eyeballs. ‘Nuff said.

<Amaranth> An option where two people disagree on how something will work? Not gnome
<Amaranth> Automatically figuring out what to do based on the circumstances? Gnome

‘Nuff said. Should apply to any user-facing software.

But yes, even after this Zen moment, I’m still writing the book. =)

During the talk, I looked at three kinds of rules and how they emerge in a project where no party has the formal power to enforce any particular normative set. I talked about GNOME and their set of rules: contractual, technical, and social. At each level it is fairly easy to see the holiness of technology as the most important driving force for the emergence of rules.

At a basic contractual level, GNOME obvously has inherited the licensing culture of the Free Software tradition and the GNU project in particular. However, the holiness of technology has dictated the compromise of the LGPL into the GNU framework: a slightly more liberal license was written for licensing libraries, in order to advance Free Software in the long run. Consequently, the GNOME libraries tend to be LGPL, not GPL. This kind of licensing turned out to be an important advantage for GNOME. Most of the commercial software giants looking to port their applications to Linux or Unix desktop found the LGPL libraries more friendly to code against than Qt for example, when Qt used to be dual licensed with the GPL and Trolltech’s proprietary license. As a consequence, GNOME is the “business desktop” of the Free Software world.

Technical requirements are suggested in GNOME through Bugzilla wishlist bugs. The bug’s life span is as follows. A user is not happy with an application and suggests a change by filing a bug like “Feature X should be added to application Y, so that users could more easily do Z.” At this point everyone can agree that the feature would be beneficial for users, and it will be implemented in a future version. Everyone will be happy. However, quite often this is not the case. Commercial vendors may think the feature would not benefit their customers. The feature may be patented. The feature may even be politically incorrect in some countries. Usability regressions may occur. All these reasons however, can be reduced to technical arguments. Commercial success, international acceptability, compliance to law and accessablility standards of various countries all contribute to the growth of the user base. According to Linus’ Law, more users means better technical quality.

Last year, a proposal was made to create a code of conduct for the GNOME project, inspired Ubuntu’s similar document. The community rejected a detailed document like the Ubuntu CoC, but agreed to write down a minimal list of principles to point to. No discussion forum is more obsessed with staying on topic than the mailing lists of Free Software projects. Idle chatter, flamewars and personal exchanges of opinion are noise. Noise in turn is bad, because it makes it more difficult for the community to focus on the problem at hand. Social rules emerge as a consequence. Digressions are directed to a more appropriate mailing list. Participants of flamewars and personal exchanges are encouraged to take them to personal mail. There are clear technical reasons for this of course: keeping the signal-to-noise ratio as good as possible contributes to the effectiveness of desicion making and problem solving on the list.

To make a gross simplification, the principles of software freedom are codified in the Copyleft licenses. The discussions on the GNOME Bugzilla and the mailing lists are codified in the Human Interface Guidelines. The basic set of mailing list rules are codified in the Code of Conduct. All these documents together form the basic set of rules that have emerged from the collective experience of a Free Software project as it has matured. It is the minimum amount of normative material extracted from mailing list archives, past desicions, and trial and error – to enable them to better work towards a technical goal.

In this manner, a large mature Free Software project resembles a rational bureaucracy with a firm contractual base, a set of technical standards and procedures, and social norms and taboos. This normative layer rests on an uncontested belief, in this case the advancement of technology.