MoveOn's "Geek Organizer" Online Job Fair

[Jim Herrmann]

Jason Clinton wrote:

> There is an appropriate balance barrier however and I
> believe it wasn't even remotely approached by Jim's post.
>
Thanks for this defense Jason.  I felt that the post was perhaps 
borderline, but mostly relevant.  One of the profile questions was 
checking to see if you understood regular expressions, and another 
question on valid HTML.  So, they are looking for people like some on 
this list.  This post was about jobs for geeks, like myself, and most 
others on this list.  It is not a particular job opening, per se, but 
rather about a matching of people with geek skills, leadership ability, 
and communication skills with organizations, yes probably liberal 
activist organizations, that really need help from people with this rare 
combination of skills.  If you don't have all three of these skill sets, 
don't pursue this opportunity.  If your political leanings are to the 
right, you probably would not be a good match for these organizations, 
but you are certainly welcome to help out. 

At this point, we don't even know what the organizations will be.  At 
this point, it's an experiment to see if there really are people out 
there with all those skills.  I feel that I have each of those skills, 
although some may disagree with me on various parts of the skill set.  I 
am, no doubt, deeper in some than in others, and maybe not great at any 
one of them, but I feel reasonably balanced between the three.  I know 
from reading the posts on this list for years that there are other 
people on this list who do have at least two of these skills, and I was 
targeting those people with my post.  It's hard to judge leadership 
through a mailing list, but the other two are easy to identify, and I 
know some of you out there have both technical and communication skills 
and even a few with left leaning politics.  ;-)  I also know there are 
people on this list who are deep in only one of these skills, and, 
assuming you recognize this in yourself, should not apply for this 
opportunity.  And that's OK to be strictly technical.  I totally respect 
and admire that.  Everybody has their part to play, and the world is not 
exactly flush with deep technical thinkers, so it's good to have you around.

So, you see, it really was more about geekdom, than politics.  The fact 
that MoveOn.org is a progressive organization, is only a side note.  It 
was definitely not political content.  Oh, I could fire some political 
content about the government, especially of the last several years, but 
I will hold my tongue, in deference to the list.  In the future, please 
read and understand the whole message before making judgments about the 
appropriateness of a particular post.  In fact, I just reread the 
message, and the MoveOn.org message says nothing about the political 
leanings.  If I hadn't added that warning at the beginning about the 
right deep end, would it have contained any politics at all?

In addition, I think that Linux users tend to be activists of a sort.  
They may, or may not be politically active, but most of us are activists 
for freedom from the tyranny of Redmond.  It's not a huge leap from 
linux activism to the activism of progressive politics.  Yet another 
reason why I felt it was appropriate.  I'm not sending this to my DB2 
list, because I don't feel the same way about those people.  I feel like 
you guys care about stuff outside of your job, and are trying to make 
the world a better place.  I don't get that feeling, and my feeling 
could be completely misguided, but I just don't get that same feeling 
from most of the DB2 community.  The linux world is a special community 
in that respect.  I'm honored to be here.

Thank you for your time,
Jim Herrmann