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- title: In which I receive the O'Reilly Open Source Award
- date: 2015-09-01 13:10
- author: Christine Lemmer-Webber
- tags: oscon, award, foss, free software, life, mediagoblin
- slug: oreilly-award
- ---
- <p>
- Well, I'm late in putting this one out there, but it's still worth
- putting on the record! About a month ago, I was fortunate enough to
- receive the O'Reilly Open Source Award. In fact, here's a picture of
- me receiving it!
- </p>
- <p class="centered">
- <img src="/etc/images/blog/receiving_oreilly_award.jpg" alt="receiving the award" />
- <br />
- <i>
- Photo taken by Brandin Grams,
- <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a>,
- originally microblogged by
- <a href="https://twitter.com/o0karen0o/status/624660833805533184">Karen Sandler</a>
- </i>
- </p>
- <p>
- (... there's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D4kSVcELjM">a video</a>
- too!)
- </p>
- <p>
- So, getting the award was exciting and unexpected. Exciting, because
- just look at
- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Reilly_Open_Source_Award">the
- list of people who have received this award previously</a>!
- </p>
- <p>
- Even to just share the stage with friends Marina Zhurakhinskaya of
- <a href="http://outreachy.org/">Outreachy</a>, Stefano Zacchiroli of
- <a href="http://debian.org/">Debian</a>, and Sarah Mei was a huge
- honor (okay, Sarah Mei is not someone I know, but I know very well of
- <a href="http://railsbridge.org/">Railsbridge</a> and the many ways
- it has paved forward diversity initiatives in free software). Plus,
- even though I don't know much about
- <a href="https://hadoop.apache.org/">Hadoop</a>, I know others who do,
- and the looming head of Doug Cutting behind us in videorecording
- excited them! And looking at
- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Reilly_Open_Source_Award">former recipients</a>,
- nearly everyone on this list is a person who has made humongous
- strides in shaping the world of free and open source software, and
- let's face it, almost everyone on this list has done more in that
- capacity than I have.
- </p>
- <p>
- Which leads me to the surprise part... I was really not expecting this
- award, so when I saw the email informing me I was being awarded it I
- began to flag it as spam, assuming it was something that snuck past
- spamassassin. But wait, I actually <i>know</i> this award! I then
- preceded to try to get Morgan's attention (she was on the phone) by
- exuberantly waving my arms, which lead our dog to jump up and also
- wave her forelegs in a very similar fashion.
- </p>
- <p>
- So that is all to say I'm very honored to have received the thing!
- </p>
- <p>
- So, then I knew I received the award, but didn't know for what text I
- was nominated until the ceremony, but I was really happy with it when
- I heard it said: for my free software advocacy (and with those words)
- and my work on <a href="http://mediagoblin.org">GNU MediaGoblin</a>
- (GNU was pronounced with each letter as if a university chant...
- G! N! U!). I suspected as much and I'm glad I received the award under
- that description.
- </p>
- <p>
- And that is also to say I am really glad for the recognition!
- </p>
- <p>
- The recognition does help, in some way, as a counterbalance to other
- feelings. In another sense, I also look at the list of other people
- who have received the award and I feel a bit embarrassed because I
- think maybe I don't deserve it. I had confided in this to some
- friends (I guess it's no longer confiding now that I'm writing in a
- blogpost), and the response has mostly been something along the lines
- of "of course you do, just feel good about the thing", and of course
- that's also the kind of thing you want to hear from your friends, and
- it would be pretty embarrassing if they didn't say those kinds of
- things in response, and you begin to wonder that given that if you're
- playing some sort of scripted roles, and typing this I even wonder if
- this "I don't deserve it" text is doing that too, and maybe it is,
- maybe everything is... but I still think sometimes I am fooling
- everyone and when I am given recognition that I am some kind of tricky
- person, tricky enough to trick people into giving me an award for a
- pile of incomplete things.
- </p>
- <p>
- I think there are a variety of reasons for this, one of the more
- obvious being that MediaGoblin is moving along but it isn't <i>there</i>
- yet, something I think nobody is more deeply aware of than myself.
- And people are still locked down by proprietary network services, we
- still don't have a generally agreed upon federation standard, and it
- is still <i>really hard to run your own server</i>. These aren't my
- battles alone and a good number of us are working on them, (and I even
- have interesting things to report in these areas that I have not yet
- blogged about) but when I think about things not being done I feel
- personally responsible for it. Part of the challenge also is that I
- do not generally look at my life as in terms of things I have
- accomplished, but in terms of the things I haven't, and obviously that
- is not a great strategy for feeling good about the things you've done.
- </p>
- <p>
- But let me turn this blogpost back around again, before I look like
- some kind of jerk who gets an award and then mopes about it!
- </p>
- <p>
- In this same sense the recognition has helped a lot. Not everything
- that I want to see done is done yet, but the O'Reilly Open Source
- Award selection process happens through previous winners, so clearly
- people who know better than I do have recognized that the things we've
- done and the direction we're heading are the right ones.
- </p>
- <p>
- You may notice that I'm switching between "I" and "we", so a bit more
- on that... it's worth noting that any accomplishments I have are
- connected to some significant free software community, so they're
- hardly just "my" accomplishments... that statement of indicating that
- the roads we're heading down are the right ones applies to all the
- people in the communities of which I've become some apparent type of
- minor figurehead. (Be wary of pedestals, with coordination like mine,
- a great way to dash oneself against the floor...)
- </p>
- <p>
- So! That's a lot of words there, but the crux it is that I'm still
- excited to have gotten the award, and as much of a worrier as I am,
- the recognition is especially nice as a kind of reassurance. In the
- meanwhile, I have a fancy new bookshelf and a nice little display for
- this hunk of glass:
- </p>
- <p class="centered">
- <a href="/etc/images/blog/bookshelf_with_award_full.jpg">
- <img src="/etc/images/blog/bookshelf_with_award_full-scaled.jpg" alt="On the bookshelf" /></a>
- </p>
- <p class="centered">
- <a href="/etc/images/blog/bookshelf_with_award_zoom.jpg">
- <img src="/etc/images/blog/bookshelf_with_award_zoom-scaled.jpg" alt="On the bookshelf, zoomed in a bit" /></a>
- </p>
- <p class="centered">
- <a href="/etc/images/blog/oreilly_award.jpg">
- <img src="/etc/images/blog/oreilly_award-scaled.jpg" alt="O'Reilly award, on display" /></a>
- </p>
- <p>
- Pretty cool hunk of glass, right? I think so!
- </p>
- <p>
- <i>PS:</i> John Sullivan snapped this image of Stefano Zacchiroli and I right
- after the ceremony, on a trip to Powell's books.
- </p>
- <p class="centered">
- <a href="/etc/images/blog/award_winners.jpg">
- <img src="/etc/images/blog/award_winners-scaled.jpg" alt="Award Winners at Pow-ells" /></a>
- <br />
- <i>
- "Award Winners" photo taken by John Sullivan
- <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA 4.0</a>
- </i>
- </p>
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