[Cadre-politics] status: mission

[Dan MacNeil]

Two status messages in a single year is a record for
2009. (yey me!) Next week, I'll write about our struggle against
Goliath and how we're rooting for the big guy to win. The week
after, I'll probably write about formal parameters in Perl or how
people are reacting us ending our hosting service.

La Presidenta KZ and I are just back from a
http://JerichoRoadProject.org board training cleverly disguised
as a focus group. I learned (duh!) of research that says that
easy to recruit board members tend to do more and better work
than hard to recruit board members.

Another useful bit was that many non-profit board members don't
know the mission statement of the organization they govern.

It's a bit embarrassing to admit how true this last bit is. In the
last two months, (2) CSL board members approached me and said
approximately:

   "I think we're doing great work, Here is a $150
    check. What is it that we do again? I know
    don't host websites any more."

Part of the problem is that sensible people would rather eat a
plate of live cockroaches dipped in rat poison than attend a
retreat to develop a mission statement. See:

	http://web.mit.edu/jcb/humor/scott-adams-mgmt-consultant

My brief period of bitterness with http://Habitat.org started
when I learned the official mission statement was **not**:

   Eliminate poverty housing from the face of the
   earth, by making simple decent housing a matter
   of conscience.

...which was what founder Millard Fullar kept telling people. It was 
something a lot more complicated which I still can't remember.

Anyway lately at conferences, bars and weddings, I've been
telling people:

   We write open source software to run
   web directories of social services.

   You search on food, you get the locations
   of food pantries, food stamps and WIC.

...This seems to go over a smoother lot better than the previous
mumbo jumbo about how Richard Stallman:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

... is the greatest prophet since the old testament.

Still this lacks vision. I'm thinking our medium term mission: (new! I'm 
just making it up now!) is:

   To exploit talent
   that would otherwise
   be ignored.

We've had our share of privileged, white, male programmers, but
most of them have been a little bit out of the mainstream.
(College dropouts, jobless, juvie jail alumni, "at risk",
medicated, vegetarians,etc)

We've always been about 50/50 male/female which is way more PC
than tech industry as a whole. In the last 2 years 4/5 of our
programmers have been Indian women. --not a group
traditionally known for their position of power and influence.

The use of the word "exploit" is deliberate. The goal is to get stuff 
done. Most of the people with talent that isn't ignored want $50/hr. It 
sure is nice to build skills and help move on to market rate jobs, but 
that is a side effect not a goal.

Longer term, our secret mission/ulterior motive is of course to bring 
about the post scarcity society:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity

...by making the values of the hacker sub culture (transparency, 
meritocracy, generosity, etc) the values of the entire culture.

I suppose this will do until we hire an expensive consultant to 
obfuscate it.