Participation: babies are not freeloaders, non-participants are!

as originally posted on O'Reilly's XML Blog

One of the great disappointments of the open source movement has been the way that lazy users don’t feed changes and improvements back, but are passive recipients. And often we see open source programs reflecting the priorities of its sponsors not its users. However, the standards process (when running correctly) have procedures in place to make sure that stakeholder comments will get looked at; but just like with open source there is an enormous intertia and laziness among stakeholders to participate.

The value proposition of open source and open standards, for many organizations, is that they get something for free, but that attitude ultimately means they get something sub-optimal for free. Organizations, and governments need to consider this very strongly, who have mission critical deployments or procurement programs based on open standards or open source need to assertively, pro-actively participate in the development and maintenance efforts of those programs.

There is a great quote (I’d have to track down who from: Dan Savage?) about gay couples holding hands in public: that to some extent in order to live in the world you want to you have act as if it were there rather than waiting for it to happen outside your actions. The same is true for standards: participation is essential.

[NOTE: this was previously posted to the OReilly DEV NEWS site by mistake.]

Contracting Resource Publications

If you're going to follow updates to the FAR and the procurement process, why not follow them thru seasoned professionals, who are longer-term veterans than myself - The guys over at Wifcon (click->http://www.wifcon.com/blog/blogger.html) are pretty well-versed in contracting and would be happy to advise.

New info regarding employment for Contracting Workforce

Links:

US Government inforcing the concept of hiring more "qualified" people for their contracting positions - http://www.fcw.com/online/news/154117-1.html

What got me here?

You can also find my background and personal blog on my site, located here.

I entered the industry fresh from college with ambitions to join the contracting community for several reasons. It wouldn't have seemed likely for me to get here without some sort of luck given the inherent self-preservation mentality that most "contractors" maintain. However, a little persistence and faith and maybe a lot of luck (from a higher power?) later, and I was in.

What made me want in this industry in the first place? I sought after a respectable career-path from early childhood and believe that an honest days work gets an honest days pay. Modeling my choices after those who had acheived the unacheivable, I decided a decent lifestyle could be afforded by choosing a career in this field.

Other things that have contributed to my wanting to pursue this field were: my father's twenty-five years as a Federal Contracting Officer for SPAWAR (DAWIA-level-III) -- this impressed upon me a great deal of respect for the Contracting community and the possibility of putting the taxpayers' money to good use. Secondly, there is a great deal of similarity between the occupational skills one would need for this position and personality characteristics I exhibit that give me an edge in obtaining the necessary skills for this job - I learned this thru management courses at USC and the Miggs-Breyers career-personality-indicator. Last but not least, I never turn aware from opportunity and the compensation for jobs in the civil service can be OUTSTANDING!

My first experiences in this industry have been positive, but even moreso, they have given me insight into the realistic perspective that our old-fashioned approach and processes for Procuring goods and services are as much inefficable as they are wasteful.

Please let me know if you think of a better way to enable governmental change, so that I can help put our country's vast resources to better use in order to help us regain our competitive advantage for the future. We will need that to continue to prosper in the 21st Century global market and to give our kids a better chance.