Re: Community Service

[Ross Golder <ross golder org>]

On อ., 2005-10-11 at 12:00 -0400, Andrew Case wrote:
> To whom it may concern,
> 
> 	So I've got a bit of an interesting predicament.  And I was wondering
> if anyone knew who I could talk to about my situation.  Making a long
> story short, two years ago I was in a car accident in which I lost
> control of my car.  I ended up getting in an accident and I ended up
> being convicted of two traffic misdemeanors (which is only because of
> the sad state of the legal system is here in the states).  Anyway, it
> all boils down to the fact that I have 180 hours of community service
> that I have to perform.
> 	Here is where the gnome foundation fits in.  I'm just your typical
> computer nerd who loves open source software and I've been doing minor
> gnome development (submitting patches) for projects like gdm for the
> last year or so.  Since the gnome foundation is a nonprofit
> organization, and my community service has to be preformed at any
> non-profit and non-religion based organization, I was wondering if I can
> get gnome development passed off as community service.  I think this
> should be completely legit, since the gnome foundation is nonprofit
> status here in the states.  The only thing I think I need is some sort
> of supervisor that is actually associated with the foundation to sign my
> hours worked form (which we can do by fax).
> 	So basically, I was thinking that if I talk to a maintainer beforehand
> about this, and when I submit work(patches), the maintainer would verify
> how many hours I've put in, they can pass this on to a member of the
> foundation such as a committee member or someone else that works for the
> foundation.  That foundation member would be my supervisor and sign off
> on my hours (by fax).  Does anyone know if this is possible or if the
> foundation has ever done anything like this?  Any information would be
> appreciated.  Is there a foundation member that knows anything about
> this?
> 

I know nothing of US law, and I don't live in the US, but if you put a
significant enough amount of work into my GNOME project (gtranslator),
I'd happily sign and fax a document saying that you did so. Not sure if
that'd count!

I'd be interested to see what others think about this, and whether this
would work. In fact, I encourage other hackers with little hacking time
to commit similar misdemeanours :)

--
Ross