lev·er·age (lĕv’ər-ĭj, lē’vər-)

Perhaps the most important thing we can do to support our community is to provide (relatively) small investments that help a large number of people. This has been described by others as leverage, an often overused word in the business context. But, it’s appropriate here. Leverage stems from the word lever. And, if you think about what a lever does, it multiplies a force applied to another object, enabling more “work” (the term from Physics 101) to be done…

OK..sorry for the lapse back to high school physics. But, the concept of leverage is something that is taking hold with this program. Identifying small but high-impact ideas that benefit large parts of the community is exciting. For instance, upgrading the landfill server for the Bugzilla community and others is a good example of leveraged support from this community program.

Here’s another leveraged idea brought to me by a volunteer:

“How about a work-station of reasonable quality (boosted up to 2GB or 3GB RAM) installed with a Linux distro of choice, set up with a complete build environment and then offered to those hackers who contribute C++ code and are not employed by Mozilla, IBM, Google, etc.

“This machine could also be advertised on the build-it-yourself, hack-the-source, etc. web pages — allowing volunteers access to that environment for a restricted time with the option of continuing access should they end up with patches in BugZilla…”

I don’t know if this is possible, but I’ll research the need and the possibility. In the meantime, feel free to comment on this or send me similar ideas. Thanks everyone.

Researching Perl Foundation

I know I wrote about Perl earlier, but I think the Foundation does a nice job articulating their process on their website. What they are doing is much more structured than what we are creating. I found this description of their selection committee process interesting. Frankly, I am not sure we’ll want to be as structured as they are…I believe there is some benefit to remain more nimble. But, I continue to look at what they do as a comparison point. I’ll try to blog more about other sites I am researching. If you know of any analogous programs that are doing interesting things, please email me.